This paper proposed a novel approach for the Power Quality (PQ) disturbances classification based on the wavelet transform and self organizing learning array (SOLAR) system. Wavelet transform is utilized to extract feature vectors for various PQ disturbances based on the multiresolution analysis (MRA). These feature vectors then are applied to a SOLAR system for training and testing. SOLAR has three advantageous over a typical neural network: data driven learning, local interconnections and entropy based self-organization. Several typical PQ disturbances are taken into consideration in this paper. Comparison research between the proposed method, the support vector machine (SVM) method and existing literature reports show that the proposed method can provide accurate classification results. By the hypothesis test of the averages, it is shown that there is no statistically significant difference in performance of the proposed method for PQ classification when different wavelets are chosen. This means one can choose the wavelet with short wavelet filter length to achieve good classification results as well as small computational cost. Gaussian white noise is considered and the Monte Carlo method is used to simulate the performance of the proposed method in different noise conditions.